Hi folks,
I'm trying to better understand:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-xmlschema-2-20041028/#token
It seems to me that the use of the singular "token" is misleading and
contradictory in the first sentence "token represents tokenized strings".
I think of a tokenized string as a set of tokens (plural) separated
by singleton spaces. Each non-space-sequence of characters being a
token. Certainly this would be in line with NMTOKENS being a list of
space-separated NMTOKEN values that don't have spaces.
In XML 1.0 attribute normalization there are only singleton spaces,
but where spaces are present they are separating members of a
list. XSLT offers string normalization to create a string that is of
type token and happens to satisfy normalizedString ... though the
function does not produce any normalizedString value that contains
multiple contiguous spaces.
If "token" were an adjective, then "token string" would be "a string
of tokens", so perhaps it is meant to be used here as an adjective
(yet the data type "normalizedString" doesn't work well as an
adjective in "a normalized string string").
The schema specification clearly describes the value is an atomic
string that contains singleton spaces. So an application acting on
"token" would act on the entire string value in which it would find
space-separated values of non-space character sequences. The
specification clearly does not state the token value is a list of
tokens. So the atomic value passed to the application may have spaces in it.
So, what would use cases be in guiding users to use "token" in
preference to "normalizedString"? When are singleton spaces in a
value passed to an application of more importance than arbitrary
sequences of contiguous spaces in a value, when that value is an
atomic value not a list of non-space sequences?
Is there anywhere in the W3C specifications where the definition of
the word "token" in the token data type distinguished from the
definition of the word "token" in the name token and name tokens data
types (NMTOKEN/NMTOKENS)?
Thanks for any guidance you may have on interpreting this.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . Ken
--
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